Donald Trump has used his first post-election interview – which will air this morning Australian time – to double down on his election promises re: illegal immigration, promising that he’ll immediately deport millions of people and work towards constructing a wall on the border with Mexico.
Despite the fact much attention has been given to Trump ‘backtracking’ on many of his election promises – such as the vague softening of his rhetoric on Obamacare, for example – it doesn’t really seem like that’s the case when it comes to his extreme border policies.
He said in the 60 Minutes interview thathe will move to immediately deport or incarcerate between 2 to 3 million “criminal” undocumented immigrants:
What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably 2 million — it could be even 3 million — we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate. But we’re getting them out of our country. They’re here illegally.
He went on to say that the people who don’t meet the description of ‘criminal’, a determination will be made later:
After the border is secure and after everything gets normalised, we’re going to make a determination on the people that they’re talking about, who are terrific people — they’re terrific people, but we are going to make a determination at that.
It’s worth querying whether the United States even has the law enforcement infrastructure to make that happen, but there can be no doubt that the intention is there. House Speaker Paul Ryan has said there are no plans to establish a deportation force – but Ryan has been drastically wrong on Trump before, and there’s no reason to assume he’s right this time.
That being said, the Obama administration has deported at least 2.5 million people since they came to power in 2009 – around 23% more than the Bush years. Trump’s clearly proposing a faster timeline, but something of that scale is not without precedent.
He was asked whether he would accept a ‘fence’ instead of a border wall. “For certain areas I would,” he replies. But he insists most of it will be a wall.
US president-elect Trump says border wall cld be a fence in spots, vows to catch 2~3m ppl that are in the country illegally &are “criminal” pic.twitter.com/6MJS4CCNA3
— Yannis Koutsomitis (@YanniKouts) November 13, 2016
We’ll keep you posted on the details of this interview as more of it becomes available this morning.
Source: 60 M/inutes.
Photo: 60 Minutes.
